The private eye of fiction is positively assailed on all sides by the classic Simple Case That Turns Out to Lead to Something Much Bigger. So I guess it’s not surprising that the Three Investigators aren’t immune.

The Mystery of the Dancing Devil (1976) is the 25th entry in the series and the seventh to be written by Dennis Lynds under his William Arden nom de plume, and starts simply enough: with six-year old Winifred Dalton offering them fifty cents to find her missing doll, Anastasia. Anastasia had been left out in her special bed to sleep under a tree in the Dalton yard, and Winifred watched in horror as the doll and bed alike rose up into the tree and vanished. Of course, such a small case is beneath the capabilities of the boys, who turn her down flat…but then some mild snooping and a little piece of serendipity makes them realise that a variety of objects were stolen from houses on the street on the same night…and we’re off.

Setting a trap for the thief, having realised what links the items which were stolen, the boys are then able to track him to his base of operations and…a hairy, buffalo-horned being with red eyes and bones hanging around its waist dances at them and scares the boys away.

“It looked like some kind of demon,” said Bob. “A demon that’s half animal, half human.”

From here…well, sort of rinse and repeat, really. The Three Investigators trace or follow someone, are about to intervene, and the Dancing Devil shows up and scares them away. Some discussion is had, a development occurs, and the Dancing Devil shows up again. Then do that again, and then one more time, and then the books is done.

I sound jaded about this, but then I feel a little jaded. It’s not entirely the book’s fault — I have not been enjoying my reading lately, and picked this up in the hope of a change of pace that might get me back up on the right track, or some other mix of metaphors. Instead, where these books usually take me less than a day to read, I trudged my way through this over a week, to the point that by the time I came to pick this up for the finale I honestly couldn’t remember who some of the characters were. And, sure, maybe a more compelling book would have gripped me, but equally I’ve given up on a lot of stuff just because I’m not able to get on its wavelength, so at least this has the distinction of my reading every page.

It is very Scooby-Doo, right down to the unmasking of the ‘surprise’ villain at the end, with three intelligent young men — who have been through enough of this sort of thing before not to get to caught up in the apparently supernatural appearance of the Dancing Devil — getting scared and running away time after time. We’re a “Zoinks!” and someone losing their glasses away from the copyright lawyers getting involved, I feel, and it’s just a little…flat.

Irritatingly, bits of it go unresolved, too: at one point they flee from a cave that’s a hangout for the gang of tough boys in Rocky Beach — Exit, Pursued by a Devil — and despite there only being one exit the Devil does not come out. So they re-enter and find a pile of smoking ashes that’s supposed to account for the Devil’s disappearance…but it doesn’t, at all. Hitchcock commends them on the “series of small errors you did well to analyse”, but actually there’s a chain of evidence here which simply does not join up. And, sure, we’re seen that before in the series — hello, The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971) — but we’ve also seen some very smartly-wrangled stuff in this series and it’s not unreasonable to expect better.

I’m not going to drag this out, because in a more receptive mood I might have had some fun with the unapologetic hokeyness of it all (Exhibit A). A few good idea permeate — like Jupe, Pete, and Bob going from neighbour to neighbour to get a better impression of the key event which gives the central plot shape, or how this simple ‘floating doll’ case turns into an event with international implications — so it’s far from a complete duff, but I wish I could feel more enthusiastic about it overall. I’ll reread it when in a better reading mood and hopefully enjoy it more; for now, I just need to work out how to get myself on that other track I mentioned up top.

Editor’s Note: Jim does not post about books in the order he reads them, so the next post already finds him in a better mood.

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The hub of Three Investigators reviews on The Invisible Event can be found here.